The management of copyrighted material in the prior art is largely based upon hard copy technology, which attaches attribution and notification to creative works, such as copyright notices, by lines and credits. This technique is prone to significant error because notices become outdated, removed and/or ignored. Further, any copyright violation of the hard copy creative work—such as physical, unlawful copying of an article on a copying machine—is difficult to determine.
Digital media exacerbate these problems. Specifically, copyright infringement and theft has increased enormously in the computer age, particularly with respect to information data transfers through the Internet. Further, electronic email and the communication and connectivity of local and wide area networks (LANs and WANs, respectively) have facilitated unauthorized use of copyrighted materials by permitting tagging and/or enclosing of almost any electronic media, such as application software, authored text files and graphics, and musical sounds.
On-line services such as Compuserve™ and America Online™ do provide some measure of copyright protection by assessing on-line charges to the access of protected databases and to the download of selected files. However, there is little to prevent that on-line user from retransmitting any downloaded files to another user connected on the Internet. If the user is also connected to a network, those downloaded files are also subject to remote access from yet another unauthorized user.
The problems associated within electronic copyright infringement are well known, particularly by those parties injured by the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. For example, the unauthorized copying of copyrighted magnetic diskettes, and the electronic email and tagging and/or enclosing of copyrighted files can result in a direct monetary loss to the owner of the copyrighted works, in addition to an unaccounted for gain for the unauthorized user. With the expansion of the Internet and other computerized networks, the aggregate amount of such losses and gains is substantial.
Even the U.S. Commerce Department recognizes that serious copyright problems exist with the burgeoning growth of electronic data transfers between networked computers and particularly through the Internet. Early in September 1995, for example, the Commerce Department issued a white paper entitled “Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure.” The paper highlights the need to protect copyrighted information that is resident in cyberspace, where unauthorized users can copy original works of authorship, including movies and books, by pressing a couple of keystrokes. See, V. Sussman, Copyright wrong? A fight brews over who gets to own the future (cyberspace), U.S. News & World Report, Sep. 18, 1995, v119 n11 p99(1).
In the prior art, methods have been developed to enhance copyright protection of electronic media. For example, AT&T Bell Laboratories has developed a system which makes tiny adjustments to the spacing between words so that every copy of a document utilizing the system is “unique.” These electronic adjustments are detectable by computers only because they are too small for the human eye to notice. By way of another example, Digimarc, a company in Portland, OR, recently announced a system that encodes data into an image by carefully adjusting the digital representation of individual pixels. As in the AT&T system, the encoded data is not noticeable to the eye and enables some traceability of unauthorized copyright uses. See, S. Steinberg, editor of Wired Magazine, Los Angeles Times column, p2, part D, Aug. 31 (1995).
However, such systems operate only to detect unauthorized usage of copyrighted works in digital form. They do not manage the access to copyrighted works, nor do they provide any systematic way of controlling the rights to copyrighted electronic media.
More particularly, the tracing of copyright clearances to users of copyrighted electronic media in the prior art is a tedious and often impossible task. Specifically, authors and multimedia developers have had only two practical methods for protecting their copyrights of electronic works: one method is to rely upon copyright laws and international treaties to prohibit unauthorized use of the media; and the other is to encrypt the data, so that access is restricted to those users with a decryption key.
In the first method, media developers typically do nothing; or they attach a textual copyright warning—sometimes called a “watermark”—to the media. This type of “protection” ensures free access to the media, but it works only for those honest users and derivative developers who view the work and decide whether they want to license it. However, users and developers of such media cannot be sure of the authorship or integrity of the media. Authenticity is thus sometimes increased by restricting access to the media, such as through the use of a password. By way of example, a password-protected World Wide Web page provides some measure of authenticity, but also discourages the open and free propagation of the information in the media.
In the second method, media developers can utilize powerful encryption tools, readily available in the public domain, such as those tools based on the RSA public key algorithm (Rivest, Shamir, & Adleman, 1977). However, the use of encryption to protect copyrights only serves to restrict access to the information within the media, like the password described above. Moreover, after the work is decrypted on the recipient's computer, the problems of copyright heritage and permissions for derivative development and use of the media remain.
These two methods favor either the user or the owner of the media. In the first method, for example, there is no electronic protection coupled to the media; and it thus favors the free and fair use of the media at the expense of the owners' rights. On the other hand, the second method of encryption favors the owners' rights, at least to a degree. Neither method affords both fair use and ownership protection; and neither provides for automatic management of media rights, including the controlled access to media in derivative works. Further, these methods do not intervene in managing copyrights, and are beneficial only after the copyright issue becomes a problem.